Miss Melpomene Rand staggered the last hundred yards down the highroad toward the Climbing Man Inn. She was almost blinded by the driving rain, and she was drenched to the skin. Although it was barely noon, lights gleamed from all the windows through the gray haze of the storm. Clenching her fists for a last effort, Pommy admitted to herself that she could not have gone much farther. Visions of herself lying in a ditch, all—or perhaps only partly—covered by icy rainwater, flitted through her mind. In the novel she had been reading by candlelight in her room for the last few evenings, the Heroine, one Indefensa, had been left for dead in just such a storm-battered ditch by
bandidos
who had stopped her coach and robbed her of all her jewels and money. Although her own situation was nothing like that of the girl in the novel, Pommy, recalling Indefensa’s sad plight, shivered and hastened toward the warmth and safety of the inn.

The loneliness of the life she had lived since her grandfather died had forced the girl into her greatest, in fact her only, comfort—reading. Her uncle’s library was a shabby holding, nothing like the wonderful, if predominantly scholarly, collection her grandfather had shared so happily with her, but Pommy had been able to borrow a number of Romances from the daughters of her mother’s old friends, and even once in a while from Mrs. Appledore at the inn, when travelers left them in their rooms after spending the night at the Climbing Man.

Indefensa, or, the Blighted Heroine
had been the latest of these windfalls, and, to Pommy’s unsophisticated mind, by far the most exciting. The dreadful experiences which befell the hapless but beautiful heroine exerted a powerful fascination upon the imagination of a girl who had never known anything but a quiet village and the home of a scholarly country vicar. Indefensa had suffered a shipwreck, from which she had been rescued at the last gasp by a gallant, if mysterious, stranger; a duel
á outrance
with herself as the prize; a kidnapping; two robberies; incarcerations both accidental and deliberate in ruined castles and city cellars. And her disappointments in Love . . .! Poor Indefensa had been obliged to watch not one but four handsome sailors wrenched from her grasp by, in turn, drowning, a sword fight, the Black Plague and a voluptuous Rival. It seemed to Pommy, whose greatest recent miseries had been the bad temper of her aunt and the petty malice of her two cousins, that such dramatic woes as the Defenseless One suffered were much to be preferred to her own dull and uncomfortable existence.

At this moment she was jarred out of her musings by tripping over the lowest of the steps leading up to the inn doorway. She was thankful for the bad weather which kept folk within doors and unable to see her clumsiness. Pommy hurried around to the rear of the inn to the kitchens, being unwilling to go through the main rooms in her bedraggled condition. Everyone who lived in Sayre Village had known the Reverend Augustus Mayo’s granddaughter from a child, and she knew it would distress most of them to see to what depths Miss Melpomene Rand had fallen.

In the warm, bright, good-smelling kitchen, Mrs. Appledore exclaimed when she caught sight of Pommy. She drew the girl to the huge stove and pulled up a stool for her.

“Sit down, my dearie! You’re shivering! Doll will bring you a warm drink. Whatever can you have been thinking of, then, to venture out on a day like this?”

Pommy smiled gratefully up into the plump, rosy face bent over hers. “I had to meet the mail coach. You remember that we leave for London tomorrow, and Ceci’s new cloak is to be delivered here today.” She smiled. “You know she could not leave without it!”

“Plymouth coach is an hour late already,” sniffed Mrs. Appledore, hiding her distress at the cold, pinched look on the girl’s face. “Why did they send you? And you walked, of course.”

“Can you see Uncle Charles ordering his new carriage out in this weather? Besides, the grooms are busy working on it, preparing it for the trip.”

“Well, you’ll stay here in the warm, and dry out until the coach does arrive, Miss Pommy. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ll just give Doll a hand. The inns’s full, what with this weather, and everyone’s hungry.”

After a few minutes Pommy realized that she was in the way of the bustling activity around the stove, and quietly took her warm drink into the passage which led from kitchen to taproom, thinking to stand there out of the way until she had finished the hot sweet tea. But the side door from the house to the stable opened into this hallway, and it was bitterly cold. So Pommy went toward the taproom, where several high-backed settles gave privacy and protection from drafts to the tables between them. The taproom was cozy, crowded, and poorly lit. Pommy slipped unobtrusively into the first cubby, empty because it was the darkest and the farthest from the bar, and prepared to rest in the warmth until the mail coach arrived.

Exhausted by her battle with the storm, she leaned her head against the high back of the settle and drew a long, shuddering breath. She had not been seated above two minutes when she heard a gruff voice from the other side of the wooden partition. At first she could not distinguish the words above the muted clamor of voices in the taproom, but suddenly one phrase caught her attention and she turned her head to press her ear against the thin wood.

“—the Rand kerridge . . . can’t miss it . . . painted red wi’ yella wheels . . . women’s sparklers . . . store of cash—”

Pommy stiffened. The Rand carriage! A second voice was murmuring.

“How many inside?”

“Squire, his missus, three girls. An abigail, too, most like.”

“. . . a crowd. Won’t Squire ride alongside?”

“In this rain?” scoffed the gruffer voice. “If anyone goes outside it’ll be the maid, or the poor relation.”

“A gal? ’E’d never—”

“From all I ’ear tell, they’d as soon have her pullin’ the kerridge as ridin’ in it. Squire’s family uses the gal as a drudge . . . ’er pay is as like to be a blow as tuppence.”

The voices were louder now, and less guarded.

“Well, that’s all of ’em inside the kerridge, then. Does Squire carry a pair o’ pops?”

“—you not to worry? We’ll ’ave ours out an’ ready while the old gager’s still figgerin’ out what’s to do!” the voice lowered conspiratorially and Pommy pressed her ear painfully against the wooden seat back. “. . . ’old my pops on ’em and you get the cash box. Built in under back seat, it is—about the middle—”

The other voice rose in a sharp whine. “Let
me
’old ’em up, an’ you get the dibs an’ sparklers, Quint!”

“Stow yer gab!” came the sharply hissed order. Then after a moment’s silence. “Why’re you so ’ot to ’andle the barkers, Jib?”

“It’s not so much what I
wants
as what I
don’t
want,” admitted Jib in a subdued whine.

“What’s that ’sposed to mean?” growled Quint.

“Don’t want to be fumblin’ around ’mongst all them females’ skirts to find the cash. You gotta figger them women’ll be screamin’ an’ kickin’ an’ carryin’ on like Bedlam—”

This excuse was greeted with coarse laughter. “We can ’ave ’em all out onto road whilst you nabbles the dibs. Never figured you to be scared of a bunch of skirts!”

“It’s what’s in ’em,” pleaded his companion. “I can’t abide historical females.”

“Maybe you think we should shoot ’em all first?” sneered the leader.

Pommy waited to hear no more. She turned and ran down the narrow passageway toward the kitchen, her heart pounding in her chest. So extreme was her agitation, and so dark the passageway, that she caromed headlong off a huge male figure which was just entering the inn through the stable doorway. Strong arms shot out to steady her, and she was clasped against a wet riding cloak.

“What have we here?” queried a lazy, good-humored voice.

“Oh, sir,” gasped Pommy, peering up through the gloom in an effort to discern the face above her, “there are highwaymen in the taproom who are planning to rob my uncle’s carriage tomorrow!”

There was a silence, during which the Stranger continued to hold Pommy’s wet and shivering body comfortably close. Then he said, “And what would you do, child, if I were one of the conspirators, just coming in to join the council?”

Pommy lifted her chin. “Give me credit for some perception, sir! Your voice is that of an educated man, and your—your attire suggests that highway robbery is not necessary to support you.”

The Mysterious Stranger threw back his head with a shout of laughter. “To think that I should be blessed with such an encounter at the Climbing Man! It is pure Cheltenham! Let me ask you, madame, could I not be a nobleman fallen upon hard times, who is seeking to recruit his fallen fortunes by consorting with a gang of footpads?”

“Highwaymen,” corrected Pommy absently, but her heart had lifted with a thrill of delight. No one had ever entered into her fantasies so directly, so richly, before! It was unbearable that, at the moment when she seemed to have found a kindred spirit, the fantasy should be reality, and the amused sharing of the game a hindrance to saving her family from disaster.

The Stranger noted her unconscious sigh, and the steadiness with which she faced his scrutiny. “You are serious, then? What evidence can you produce, Cassandra?”

Added pleasure! The Stranger was literate, acquainted with the Greek tale of Priam’s daughter, “prognosticating woe”—and invariably correct in her gloomy prophecies!

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